Marc Estrin : The Far-Reaching Effects of Child Abuse

Image from PsychCentral.
Child abuse:
Here, there, and likely everywhere

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2010

There have been several large studies on the effects of occupation -- bombing, physical injury, house demolitions, tear gassing, house searches, etc. -- on Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza (Google palestine/children/trauma/). A few studies look at the rather smaller numbers of traumatized children in the southern Israeli towns bordering Gaza who experience occasional rocket attacks. (Google israel/children/trauma/.)

All studies demonstrate what might be expected from such direct and witnessed exposure: concentration and attention deficit, memory problems, and various levels of post-traumatic stress disorder. War, as they say, and as shows up in their drawings, is not good for children.

Yet there is another area of child abuse, not generally labeled as such, both here and in the middle east, with which we must also be concerned: educating children toward paranoia and retributive violence.

Whatever your position is on the Israel/Palestine situation, I heavily recommend that you watch these two 10-minute YouTube segments (here and here) by an Israeli filmmaker, documenting a state-sponsored high-school trip to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz/Birkenau is a hair-raising experience. Hair-graying, too. My companion assured me at the time, that I had a few gray hairs afterwards -- my first -- I hadn't had before that afternoon. The key question, however, is what does one understand and take from that experience.

My own feeling is that these Israeli children were battered and reduced in emotional capacity going from the before to the after. See what you think.

It's not hard to connect such an "educational" experience with such consequences reported here.

America's children have little direct experience of war, occupation, and lethally threatening violence, but their lives are full of virtual exposure via film, video, music, and electronic games. In a way, their cart precedes their horse: they are learning the response before the stimulus.

Consider this NPR piece on an Army Experience Center:

Your tax dollars at work, training children to deal with terrorists who -- the adults likely assure them -- hate us for our freedoms.

One Marine boot camp chant I've come across recently goes like this:

Throw some candy in the school yard,
Watch the children gather round .
Load a belt in your M-50,
Mow them little bastards down!”

Nice. I'm sure the indoctrination in the Experience Centers is not as strong or viscous as among the Semper Fi boys, but the subtler brain-washing may be more extensive and effective.

I don't know what kind of chants they use in the IDF, or in jihadist military training, but I assume it's all similar -- child abusing "education" preparing children for the abuse of children and others.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Ray Mungo : The Pope is Toast

Pope Benedict on Palm Sunday. Photo from AP / examiner.com.
Pope is Toast, Boy Diddley, and Me

By Ray Mungo / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2010

The ongoing circus of revelations pinning responsibility for covering up boy-diddling by priests on the Holy Father in Rome himself is pure entertainment to me. Every morning brings fresh developments in the crumbling pontiff’s decline, reminiscent of Nixon’s gradual disintegration under the roaring waves of Watergate. Now, as then, I spring out of bed each day eager and expectant for the latest twist and turn that will lead, one can surely hope, to the vicar of Christ departing the Vatican in a helicopter bound for Bavaria.

Wonder of the ages, could it be? The Pope is toast. Oh joy, oh rapture.
Admittedly, I’m not an objective, neutral observer. I was one of the diddlees, a long 50 years ago when a priest in Massachusetts made a habit of pulling down my pants and using my 12, and then 13, year old body for his own shuddering pleasure.

Father didn’t ask permission. He took me in the rectory, in the projection booth of the parish auditorium, in the car, anywhere he could and as often as he liked. He liked my soft pubic hair and compared it to other boys’, because Father had lots of boys, but I was special, he said.

Stop right there. This isn’t what you might expect. It’s not, for example, the child sex abuse victim railing against his monster, not a polemic against the Catholic church, although its ultimate destruction has long been my favorite fantasy.

My molester escaped any punishment, as was the norm in the church then and throughout Benedict’s career at the controls. My guy was simply transferred to another parish, where he continued to “work with” budding youths. Eventually he died, still a holy pastor to his newly hormonal flock.

I’m not accusing him of having made me into the homosexual / atheist / alcoholic / drug addict / lacking any normal employment history, treated for depression and retired on a dime fellow that I am. Hell, no! I was probably cut out to be a freelance writer from the start and by college age was already committed to the life of the anarchic stoner. Father Fondle didn’t seem to have this effect on other boys. The ones I knew all grew up to be heterosexual breeders and genuflecting believers.

This history comes back to me in the light of all the thrilling new revelations of church cover-ups leading directly to the seat of Saint Pete, and in view of a contemporary friend of mine now serving six years in a California state prison for the felonious offense of stroking a 12 year old boy in the wrong places. My friend is not a priest. Times have changed.

Most gay men are not child molesters, of course. That ancient myth has been thoroughly discredited. Exhaustive research shows that gay and lesbian folks are not any more likely to be sexually abusive to children than straights are. There’s simply no evidence of it. Yet every time a same-sex child molestation case makes the news, the old prejudice flares up, and the Vatican is not shy about using this hateful lie as a ploy to absolve its own culpability. “It’s those terrible homosexuals who cause the problem, not the church,” is their shameful song. It won’t play in Peoria or even Palermo any more. It’s the same kind of voodoo non-science as all the other church doctrines.

The church may be the ironic victim of its own smear campaign. By laying all the blame on homosexuality, it reminds us that homosexuals are disproportionately attracted to the priesthood. If gay is bad, so is the history of the Vatican, a gay ghetto to rival any other. As a 12 year old altar boy I really loved running around in those frocks, and if Father caressed my member in the altar boys’ locker room in the church, maybe that was some kind of secret initiation rite, for all I knew. Priests live in a perpetual little boy’s clubhouse with “No Grils Allowded” scrawled on the door.

It was not for me, though. At age 13 I stopped believing in God or the church. Some might call that a “tragic robbery of faith,” I think of it as the birth of reason.

My friend in state prison is now in an isolated hospital cell after another inmate, who had discovered the nature of his crime, assaulted him in his sleep, breaking his jaw, nose, and both cheekbones before the guards intervened. The attacker meant to kill. My friend may not survive some future assault when he is transferred back into the general population. Convicted killers, rapists, and robbers consider themselves morally superior to boy-diddlers.

It wasn’t always so. Boy-diddling has been going on since recorded history began. Think of the ancient Greeks, or the Japanese Samurai warriors who groomed their pages. A small minority of adults attracted to children has always existed in every society, often taken for granted. But in our own society, it’s a curse, a crime more reviled than any other.

Somehow, though, I can’t summon any genuine hatred toward the guy who did the diddling on me. He couldn’t help himself. That’s just the way he was. He didn’t turn me into a pedophile, I’ve never been sexually attracted to kids, and he didn’t make me gay, that’s something I was born with. Where I can assign blame, however, is on the church that protected and shielded this man for years, allowing him access to children despite certain knowledge of his past.

And where I can issue praise is on the New York Times for its singular role in relentless documentation of scandals the church, and Benedict himself, spent decades trying to hide. The paper’s researchers and reporters have unearthed one horror story after another, all faultlessly documented, creating a ripple effect in all other media. A Pulitzer is surely due. Hell, a Nobel.

Let the fun continue! Every day’s a holiday when the Pope is toast. I’ll toast to that!

[Ray Mungo, a founder of Liberation News Service in 1967, is the author of Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm. He is a social worker, tending principally to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.]

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Teenage 'Sicarios' : Colombia's Child Assassins

Image from Colombia Passport.
Colombia's child 'sicarios':
Playing with guns in real time

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2010

These are not baby killers, they are babies who kill.

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia -- Sicarii (Latin plural of Sicarius ['dagger']; later used for a contract-killer) is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (probably), to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea.

The Sicarii used stealth tactics to gain their objective. Under their cloaks they concealed sicae, small daggers, from which they took their name. At popular assemblies, particularly during the pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, they stabbed their enemies (Romans, Roman sympathizers, Herodians, and wealthy Jews comfortable with Roman rule), lamenting loudly afterwards, along with the crowd, to escape detection. Literally, Sicarii meant "dagger-men."

In the past few months I have reported on life and death in Colombia. You have caught a glimpse of the violent forces at play that ordinary Colombians experience every day.

We've looked at the leftist guerrillas, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia -- Ejército del Pueblo (FARC or FARC-EP; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- Peoples Army) and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional, (ELN; the National Liberation Army). We examined the right-wing paramilitars; the secret police, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS; Administrative Security Department); the Colombian Army (COLAR), with its massacres and “false positives”; as well as kidnappings, extortion, blackmail, and rigged elections.

We've seen the failed peace processes and the complicity of our U.S. ally, the Government of Colombia, at the highest levels in the violence, and in one of its root causes, the multi-billion dollar trade in cocaine. We've looked also at what we, U.S. taxpayers, are currently funding in Colombia in the way of more bases, more arms, and more potential combatants, our own troops.

I have chronicled hundreds of thousands of deaths, two million displaced citizens, torture, rapes, wars between and among the various violent factions, and chainsaw massacres. In 20 postings, you might think that I've covered it all. Sadly, I have not. There is one more horrifying phenomenon which requires our attention to round out our picture of one of the most violent societies on earth. These are not baby killers, they are babies who kill.

Our killing machines

Child assassins, hired by paramilitaries, drug gangs, or just anybody with a grudge, killed 6,999 people in Colombia last year, El Tiempo, published in Bogotá, reported recently. Their age makes it easier for them to approach and kill their targets. Besides, they work cheap.

In June 2009 an eight-months-pregnant lawyer from Medellin was shot through the head. One of the two assassins involved was 15 years old. The recent murder of an unknown man in a BMW in Bogotá is suspected to have been committed by a 16-year old.

As El Tiempo reports, almost every single day someone in Colombia is assassinated by a minor. Generally speaking, these children are part of criminal gangs involved in robberies and are recruited for murder because they are less likely to be bothered by security forces and because they are inexpensive.

The less experience a sicario has and the lower profile the victim, the more attractive their use becomes, while remaining as efficient as the work of more experienced killers.

According to El Tiempo, many sicarios in Medellín are sons and nephews of the hitmen used by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The city is famous for producing assassins, feared throughout Colombia.

One of the sicarios the newspaper talked to received 200,000 pesos (U.S. $97) for his first murder. “I was 13 the first time I did one in. A guy from the neighborhood who was on bad terms with the husband of his daughter contracted me. I approached him from behind and put the gun close to his ear,” the kid told El Tiempo.

Pablito’s legacy

Colombia's second city of Medellín has been the most dangerous in the Americas ever since it became synonymous with drugs and the "kingpin" trafficker Pablo Escobar.

Last year the city of two million saw almost 4,000 violent deaths, according to a report just released by the Department of Criminal Investigations and Judicial Support.

Escobar, legendary head of the Medellín cartel, killed in a shoot-out with police in 1993, left a violent legacy which haunts the city today.

He created an army of sicarios drawn from poor neighborhoods in the outer reaches of the city.

The sicario philosophy was that it was better to live fast and die young, and Escobar lavished money on these desperate children and sent them out to do his dirty work, killing rival drug dealers, politicians, judges, policemen, or anyone who crossed his path.

He promised a bounty of $2,000 for every policeman killed, and his sicarios executed more than 300.

Secarios. Posed photo by Albeiror24 / Wikimedia Commons.

Guns for hire

Today's sicarios are guns for hire. One of the most notorious sicario gangs, called La Terraza, or The Terrace, after the part of Medellín in which it was born, is in a fight to the death with its former paymaster, the feared right-wing paramilitaries.

Their "enemies," once known as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia) blocs Cacique Nutibarra and Bloque Metro, have been reorganized and replaced by the resurgent paramilitary groups The Urabá Bloc or Urabeños, previously led by Daniel Rendon (also known as "Don Mario"), and the Paisas, heirs of paramilitary leader "Don Berna"; they also have links with the "Office of Envigado," a criminal organization in Medellín.

According to authorities, the child assassins are the lowest in the criminal food chain and receive only a small part of what is paid for an assassination. Criminal organizations charge up to 50 million pesos (U.S. $24,000) for a murder, but the juvenile killer only receives 1-6 % of this.

I’m ‘Sicariato’ because 'I love you'

Sicarios do not exist by themselves. They are the product of a more complex system of criminality ready to hire assassins as young as 12 to guarantee its power through terrorism. Of course, young people ready to do so come from realities of marginalization, where opportunities of education and a good living are distant mirages. Poverty and marginalization are always the cause of violence. Mafias offer hopeless young people an opportunity in life.

Many of these youths believe that they must do something to support their families, for the same reasons that many become involved in prostitution. A society that denies entrance into the systems of education, social protection, and employment plays a great part in whether a likely boy accepts the invitation of the mafias. "El Patrón” (the boss) is the one who contracts the boy to do the job (el trabajito), and then there is a relationship of loyalty. A sicario will have the same fanatical commitment as the most professional royal bodyguard of Europe.

Asked why he kills persons for money, he will answer in almost the same way as such a retainer: to help his family, because he loves his mother and wants to give her a better life.

Underage actors in Colombia are into numerous crimes, and this is not new. Drug trafficking and insurgent organizations have recruited many young people, with dramatic impact.

However, when a 15-year old is involved in a murder, as happened with the hit on the pregnant lawyer in Medellín, surprise and indignation return. Only a month earlier, in the same city, a 17-year old entered the General Hospital to finish off a patient.

Authorities reported that in Monteria, capital of Cordoba Department, seven minors were arrested for acting as henchmen in a series of murders in 2009.

This abominable phenomenon occurs all over the country. One study found that in Cali, in 2008, one in every five homicides involved a minor. Bogotá is part of the same trend, according to police: in 2007, 11 teenagers were arrested for homicide there; in 2008 the figure rose to 18. So far in 2010, there have been 19 teenage killers, most between 15 and 17.

Since the beginning of 2009, alarm bells about the growth of the murder for hire in Colombia's cities have sounded. The case of Medellín, the capital of Antioquia Department, and its metropolitan area is the most worrying. Over one long weekend there were about 22 violent deaths in the Aburrá Valley, while 11 murders were committed in 11 hours in Envigado and Bello. In the last seven months in Medellín 1,081 homicides were reported.

Authorities also warn of the consolidation of "collection agencies" in Cali, where gang feuding has increased homicide rates. In Cartagena, 77 of 105 violent deaths during the first half of 2009 involved hired killers.

In mid-May last year, the mayors of nine state capitals, Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Cucuta, Pasto, Ibague, Pereira, Manizales, and Tunja, asked the central government for more tools to deal with revenge killings.

Trained killers from Colombia are in the Mexican drug wars

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels in 2006, the death toll there has climbed to 18,000.

Colombia exports many world class products; recently it has been discovered that itexports trained and experienced sicarios to Mexico. The movement through Mexico of 90% of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. has increased violence in the war of cartels there. Now we learn that sicarios who made their bones in Colombia as youths have been exported to Mexico and elsewhere. The hallmarks of Colombian violence are apparent in thousands of executions that occurred in 2009, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

According to La Reforma, published in el D.F. (Mexico City), "A recent poll of 4,600 students in the state of Chihuahua revealed 40 percent of them aspire to be hit men... They would rather live a week like a king than have 70 years of misery."

Borders do not stop the Colombian gunmen. Internecine struggle between organized crime gangs and drug trafficking has even led to attacks in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and in Paraguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Guatemala, and Spain by Colombian sicarios.

Murder on a motorbike

Small motorcycles are a primary means of transportation in Colombian cities for many. Cartagena has 19,000 registered and an unknown number of unregistered, or falsely registered, "moto-taxis" that will take anyone on a wild ride through traffic for 2,000 pesos (about a dollar). There must be 10 times that many motorbikes. They are everywhere.

"Motos" are the favorite mode of transportation for the sicarios also. One guy drives and the shooter rides behind, they pull up behind the victim, dispatch him or her, and quickly escape into the flood of other motos that fill the streets.

Typical is this short paragraph from yesterday’s local paper:

A 42-year old man was killed last night with four shots in the parquedero [parking lot] of a well known fast food restaurant on Street 116. The prompt reaction of the police led to the arrest of one of the gunmen, one of two men on a motorcycle.

Or this , from a few days ago:

Candidate murdered in Viotá.

On Sunday at 10:30 pm Jose Amador Mora was killed, one of four candidates for mayor of Viotá [Cundinamarca], a suburb of Bogotá...

This crime happened 72 hours after the elected mayor of the municipality, Rutba Jose Navarro, was killed Friday by two hitmen.

According to authorities, Amador Mora, affiliated liberal, was caught as he walked through the town market place by two hired killers on a motorcycle, who gave him six shots in different parts of the body.

One more story of thousands:

On his birthday, the 31st of December, Juan, better known as 'Infierno' did not receive the customary hug and Happy Birthday greetings, instead, 'I felt the tingling of three bullets, two in my back and one at my waist.'

Half an hour before the attack, in the populous neighborhood of Dosquebradas San Judas, Infierno left a man called 'Diablo' with a knife through his neck, which shattered his vocal cords.

But Diablo and his friends are not the only problem for Juan.

His life was threatened four years ago when he began smoking marihuana and bazuco (crack made from cocaine paste), and snorting heroin because, he says, he was tormented by the murder of his brother. With his gang, Te Melenos, and the same drug that feeds the industry, he encountered the underworld, the power of guns, and the sight of death.

The... 'Grim Reaper' has pursued him since 2004, when for the first time with his comrades, he landed (strong-armed) a man and, not content with stealing, cut his throat.

The scene was repeated four times that week, the prize for Juan after the distribution: 20,000 pesos, [about $10 U.S.] ...[He] confessed [the killings] in front of his grandmother, an obese woman with a toothless smile.

The tenderness of the old woman vanished with the chilling confession of her grandson, 17 years old. She only managed to cover her face with her hands.

Colombia has hundreds or thousands like Juan who are ready to kill. Cheap.

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Leonardo Boff : The Church, Celibacy, and the Criminal Sinners

Why the Church neither can nor wants
To abolish the law of celibacy

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / April 13, 2010

The surge of cases of pedophile priests in almost every Catholic country persists, revealing the magnitude of this crime that causes so much damage to its victims. It is not enough to say that pedophilia shames the Church, or to ask for forgiveness and to pray. It is worse than that. It is impossible to pay the debt to the children who were abused in the shadows of the credibility and trust that the priestly function embodies.

The central thesis of the Pope Ratzinger, which I have become tired of hearing in his conferences and classes, is completely invalid. To him, the size of the Church is not what matters. It is enough that the Church be a "small flock," comprised of highly spiritual persons. It is a small "reconciled world" that represents the others and the whole of humanity.

But within this small flock there are criminal sinners, and it is anything but a "reconciled world." One must humbly accept what tradition used to say: The Church is saint and sinner, a "chaste harlot," as some ancient Fathers put it. It is not enough that it be the Church; it has to go through, as everyone else, the path of good, and integrate the pangs of sexuality -- that have a thousand million years of biologic memory, into expressions of tenderness and love, and not of obsession and violence against minors.

The pedophilia scandal is a sign of the present times. We learn from Vatican II (1962-1965) that we must glean from such signs the interpellation that God is transmitting to us. It appears to me that the interpellation goes along this line: it is time the Roman Catholic Church does what every other Church has already done: abolish celibacy imposed by ecclesiastic law, and free it for those who see meaning in it and can live it without obsession and with a profound sense of spirituality. But this lesson is not being accepted by the Roman authorities. To the contrary, in spite of the scandals, they reaffirm celibacy with greater insistence.

We know how insufficient in integrating sexuality is the education of priests. It is conducted away from normal contact with women, which produces a certain atrophy in the construction of identity. Psychological sciences have made it clear that the male only matures under the gaze of the female, and the female only under the gaze of the male. Man and woman are reciprocal and complimentary.

The cellular-genetics of sex has shown that the difference between a man and a woman, in terms of chromosomes, is reduced to just one chromosome. A woman possesses two X chromosomes and a man has one X and one Y chromosome. It follows that the sex-base is the feminine (XX), the masculine (XY) being a differentiation from it. There is not, then, an absolute sex, only a dominant one. In every human being, man or woman, there exists "a second sex." In the integration of the “animus” and “anima," that is, of the two dimensions of the feminine and the masculine present in every human being, sexual maturity gestates.

This integration is hindered by the absence of one of the parts, the woman, for which is substituted imagination and phantoms, which, if they are not disciplined, can create distortions. The teaching in the seminaries was not devoid of wisdom: who controls the imagination, controls sexuality. To a large degree, this is true.

But sexuality possesses a volcanic vigor. Paul Ricoeur, who reflected a great deal philosophically about Freud's psychoanalytic theory, recognizes that sexuality is not controlled by reason, moral norms, or the law. Sexuality lives between the law of the day, where rules and established behavior prevail, and the law of the night, the realm of impulses, the force of spontaneous vitality. Only an ethical and humanistic project of life (what we want to be) can give direction to sexuality and transform it into a force of humanization and fertile relations.

Celibacy is not excluded from this process. It is one of the possible options, which I defend. But celibacy cannot be born of an absence of love. To the contrary, it must derive from an over abundance of love for God, that overflows towards everyone around.

Why does the Roman Catholic Church not take a step forward, and abolish the law of celibacy? Because it is contradictory to her structure. It is a complete institution, authoritarian, patriarchal, highly hierarchical, and one of the last bastions of conservatism in the world. It takes the person from birth to death.

To one with a minimum of civic consciousness, the power given to the Pope is simply despotic. Canon 331 is clear: it is about a power “ordinary, supreme, plain, immediate and universal." If we replace the word “Pope” with “God,” it functions equally. For that reason it was said: ”the Pope is the minor god on earth," as many canonists have affirmed.

A Church that puts power at its core, closes its doors and windows to love, tenderness and compassion. The celibate person is functional to this type of Church, because that Church denies the celibate priest that which would make him more profoundly human: love, tenderness, the effective encounter with other persons, which could be more propitious if the priests could be married. They become totally disposable to the institution, that can send them to Paris or to South Korea.

Celibacy implies total cooptation of the priest, not into the service of humanity, but to the Church. That priest must love only the Church. When he discovers that she is not only "the holy mother Church" but that she can also be a stepmother who uses her ministers for the logic of power, the priest is disappointed, leaves the ministry with its forced celibacy; and gets married.

As long as this logic of absolutist and centralizing power prevails, we will not see the law of celibacy abolished, no matter how many scandals occur. Celibacy is too comfortable and useful to the ecclesiastic institution.

What then becomes of Jesus' dream of a fraternal and egalitarian community? That is another problem, perhaps the primary one. There, the question of celibacy, and of the style of Church, would be put differently, in a manner that would better befit His liberating message.

Original in Portuguese; translated into Spanish by Servicios Koinonia; translated into English by Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and "promoted himself to the state of laity."]

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Scandal in the Church : Time for Pope to Depart?

In 1294, Pope Celestine V issued a decree making it permissible for a Pope to resign. Then he resigned. Detail from portrait of Celestine V, artist unknown.
There is historical precedent:
Should Benedict apologize and resign?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 2, 2010

There's been a lot of controversy in the last few years with the Catholic Church and child abuse. It started in the United States, when it was learned that scores of priests were guilty of having sex with young children. At that time, the church was embarrassed when it was revealed that they knew of the abuse and had tried to hide it instead of reporting the criminal priests to the proper authorities.

The church refused at that time to admit just how widespread the problem was. They told the world this was only a problem in America, and tried to blame it on America's "permissive" society. Well, that excuse has been blown out of the water by recent revelations. It has now been revealed that the problem was just as widespread in other countries (like Ireland and Germany). It has become obvious now that this is a church problem, and not a problem with the countries in which the church is located.

And right in the middle of this scandal is the church's current leader -- Pope Benedict XVI. It is now known that while he was a Cardinal in Munich, the Pope covered up at least one priest's pedophilia and transferred him to another church, where he continued abusing children. Then after being promoted to head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he had responsibility for disciplining priests guilty of bad conduct, he continued to cover up child abuse committed by priests.

There are now many people who believe the Pope should resign. I agree. If there is even a shred of decency and morality left in him, he should apologize for his serious misdeeds and then resign the papacy. The Pope is supposed to be the moral leader and guide for the church. How can he offer moral leadership after his own immoral behavior? And the harboring and protecting of child abusers is egregiously immoral behavior!

Some may believe that the Pope cannot resign since he is supposedly appointed by god to lead the church. That is just not true. It has been permissible by the church's own canon law for a Pope to resign since the late 13th century. In 1294, Pope Celestine V issued a decree making it permissible for a Pope to resign. Then he resigned.

In 1415, Pope Gregory XII also resigned. He did so in an effort to re-unify the papacy. At the time, there were three claimants to the papacy -- Pope Gregory XII in Rome, Pope Benedict XIII in Avignon and Antipope John XXIII.

It is even rumored that during World War II, Pope Pius XII drew up a document stating that if he was captured by the Nazis the church was to consider him as having resigned and choose a new Pope (although this cannot be verified since the church still refuses to release documents from that wartime period).

So it can be seen that the resignation of a Pope is not only permitted by canon law, but there are at least two (and possibly three) precedents for it. It is now time for the current Pope to live up to his moral responsibility -- and that moral responsibility demands his immediate resignation. Nothing less will do.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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